Tips, tutorial, & info

Socializing Your Feed With Twitter

Sometimes you reach across the hedgerow to share with your nearby neighbors. Other times, members of the household move away and yet you can’t keep from calling to remind them to wear a hat and such because it’s chilly out. Today, we’re celebrating acquaintances near-and-far by launching the ability to send your feed to Twitter.

FeedBurner has always been about measuring, managing, and monetizing syndicated content. Our hope is that by providing one application in which you can direct your feed in real-time to a number of endpoints, in this case Twitter in addition to the myriad feed readers, aggregators, and search engines that we have always supported, and then following on with providing analytics for measuring exactly how and where your feed gets distributed across social media, you can make better and more informed decisions about how to monetize your content.

Many of our publishers who have tried our Google Analytics feed item link integration have already noticed that their most popular feed items have been shared many times on Twitter.

We’re now taking our distribution and analytics a step further by enabling the ability to automatically publish the feed items that meet your criteria to Twitter, using the Google URL shortener at goo.gl.

To get started, go to the Socialize service on FeedBurner’s Publicize tab and add the Twitter account to which you would like to post items from your feed. You can take the default settings and click [Save] to start socializing immediately, or use the options we offer to customize exactly which feed items are sent to Twitter and how exactly you would like them to look. The next time you post a new item to your feed it will be sent to Twitter (as always, make sure to ping FeedBurner whenever you update your feed so this process happens as near real-time as possible).

To see the results, take a look at the Twitter account in which you are sending your updates. This blog post, for instance, as well as select blog posts from this and the FeedBurner status blog, will appear from now on at http://twitter.com/feedburner. If Twitter is where you are consuming most of the latest content these days, please follow @feedburner to receive our updates in your favorite Twitter client.